Tips for Keeping Shoes Looking New

Thanks to the thumbs up from many of you this week, I HAVE NEW SHOES!!!!! Brand new white shoes, even, with pretty white soles. And this is a little scary because I am a bit of a spaz. I will inevitably stick my heel in a sidewalk crack, scuff the bottoms doing pirouettes, and might spill salsa on the top. And THAT is why I need to spend 5 minutes Kim-proofing them before my first wear.

Trace/Cut Sticky Bottoms

Protect the soles: I tend to keep my favorite shoes FOREVER (hello Prada mules from 1999), but with the rise of consignment sites, I want to be able to sell these if I find a different pair of white heels I love even more. So I will add Sticky Bottoms and Gripalicious. I just put the shoes on the liner side of Sticky Bottoms, trace, cut and stick. This will protect the soles from wear and come off cleanly when I am done. But this doesn’t provide traction or protect from divots when I walk on rocks (because I’m a spaz), so I will stick on a pair of Gripalicious (large) to the bottom as well.

Protect the heels: Especially with thin heels like these, one scratch to the leather would ruin them. These are a great candidate for Heel of Steel, urethane protectors. These are a little trickier to apply, so I am going to take my time to trace as accurately as possible on the provided tracer paper, cut to shape with the best scissors I have, and then apply very carefully, working from the center outward. This is not a removable product, so once stuck, it will be there forever, which is awesome.

Heel of Steel will protect against this

What about the top? I’m just going to have to be careful with the salsa. I’m a little wary to put any waterproofing on these, since I’m not sure which treatments the manufacturer has already put on them, and I don’t want anything to go wrong with the most visible parts.

Happy protecting! Let me know if you have questions or need hand-holding when you do yours. Oh, and post photos of your new shoes, please. 🙂